regret & remembrance

I’ve recently given myself a bit of time to feel out a major regret I’ve carried for a while, that I suspect will stay with me for life. I hope you may pause here and give yourself some time and space to let your own feelings of regret come back to the surface, ones that have been repressed, but that we both know truly fizzle out in a satisfying way when they’ve been given the time to air out and resolve, maybe re-thought.

This is what I tried doing for myself a few days ago. And what I realized after taking some time to think to myself, is that generally, I do ultimately desire to have ~no regrets~ (not due to some need to prove myself as a hardcore no-nonsense girl boss who’s never made a mistake, but) because if something is so persistently and unshakably regretful for me, then it is, in another light, worth remembering: for the sake of it serving as an opportunity, in every present and upcoming moment, to draw us, me, back to what I had always preferred to do. The present moment then functions as a new opportunity to act in a way that I may not have before.

Here’s an analogy that came to me after doing flash cards. Honestly I HATE analogies comparing science concepts to reflections; feels kind of tacky… But here we are, very obviously embodying within the things we seem to hate the most externally. Sometimes you have to take inspiration from wherever you can get it. Anyways, when we’re turning a region of DNA into RNA for the sake of eventually creating proteins, an RNA polymerase will bind to a Promoter region on the DNA to begin coding. Interestingly enough, Enhancer regions (which are located a bit farther up before the region to be coded, and once bound by an Activator) can loop up to where the coding region is, and enhance the transcription of the region in question.

The key is that the Enhancer need not be located anywhere near the Promoter. They tend to be separated by some distance. Thanks to Einstein’s intuition, and for the sake of our analogy, we may interpret them as being separated by space and therefore even by some time. And when we think of the Activator as some memory of regret we hold (no matter how far back this regret was created or planted) binding to an Enhancer that is already built into our minds somewhere as our conscience, then you may imagine that regrets can activate our consciences, loop back towards our present moments, and influence the way we act now.

When we regretted cutting short play time with our siblings years before, let us let them now tire out before we ever suggest that the weather is too cold, that our feet are getting sore, our eyes shutting closed.

Let the Enhancers loop back around and code something more uplifting, something we came to understand we always wanted, but had never acted on before. Let our past regrets serve us well today.

fin, (another thing/word I hate, why am I using it!!!)

hina

4/2/21